Transcend-Symbolists: A Joining of Two Philosophies

Transcend-Symbolists: A Joining of Two Philosophies
By the mid nineteenth century, there had arisen two prominent groups of writers with very different philosophies, the Transcendentalists and the Symbolists. The Transcendentalists, among the ranks of which were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, could be considered optimistic in their writing. The two most basic tenets of Transcendentalism (there were five all together) were that the individual is innately good and that nature was the purest place one could go. The Symbolists, which included such writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne a…